Summary:Â Most of our wars since Korea have been counter-insurgencies (COIN), in which we employ a trinity of methods — firepower, mobility, and militia. It doesn’t work for us, or for any foreign armies doing COIN. Today we review the trinity and why it fails, and ask the more important question of why we don’t …
The key to understanding our wars: the trinity of COIN. Read More »
Summary: After trying so many tactics in Afghanistan, including search and destroy sweeps, we’re back to that Vietnam era: clear and hold. A fog of vivid language disguises this from the American people. We rely on Afghanistan security forces to hold what they cannot clear. Although the current operations in Kandahar have no embedded journalists …
About our operations in Kandahar – all that’s old is new again Read More »
Surprise! We’re recruiting milita to help in Afghanistan. It’s a new tactic, just as it was in Iraq and Vietnam. It’s a direct violation of the COIN manual (FM 3-24), with its tiresome emphasis on building the legitimacy of the local puppet government. But then that was just a facade anyway, a trick to build support …
Clausewitz spoke of a trinity of the people, the government, and the military. The rise to dominance of fourth generation warfare has made this conceptually useless, providing only a perspective from which to see how the world has changed.  During the past 60 years a new trinity of modern war has emerged for armies fighting in foreign lands. Chet Richards …
The trinity of modern warfare at work in Afghanistan Read More »
Summary: our use of firepower, artillery and airpower, is one of the great undercovered stories of the Iraq War. It has profound implications, both humanitarian and for our grand strategy. This is a second posts about our attempts to win hearts and minds with artillery; see the first here. Here is a brief excerpt …
Another example of winning hearts & minds with artillery Read More »
